Ecology & Zoology

The American chestnut tree (Castanea dentata) was once among the most culturally and economically important trees in the eastern United States but in the last century more than four billion trees were lost due to chestnut blight. Along with the hardwood the trees provided, the chestnut was important for both humans and livestock - not only eaten, chestnuts were a cash crop for people in the Appalachians because street vendors in big cities sold them fresh-roasted to passers by.   It's in The Christmas Song! What went wrong?   It seems that in 1904 an imported tree brought with it…

Sigh. I was going to write with lyric beauty about a dream I had last night, in which I was finally, finally successful in feeding baby squid. I watched them stuffing copepods into their mouths with deep satisfaction. But that will have to wait, because guess what? In this case, it's an article called Santa loves Calamari. Well-intentioned, but wrong. The premise of the piece is that "squid is the new sustainable holiday seafood" based on information like: How much squid is out there? Around the world, squid mass is estimated to outweigh the human population. This is a classic problem of…

News of the California market squid fishery closure is spreading. "We have had a banner year for market squid this year," said Dale Sweetnam, a Fish and Game marine biologist who oversees the commercial squid market. "The colder-than-normal water conditions we have observed since February have provided optimal conditions for squid spawning." Indeed, market squid spawning seems to be going well. Check out this cool video of egg beds taken by some divers off La Jolla. Each of those white fingers probably has 200-300 eggs in it!

A key question in ecology is: who eats whom? This can be fairly straightforward to answer, by observing predatory or grazing activities, by opening up stomachs or sifting through feces, or even by analyzing chemical signals. A more challenging follow-up question is then: how many do they eat? Calculating a rate of consumption is considerably trickier! I've run up against this problem as a result of an astute comment on my Polluted Whales post a couple of days ago. Sure, sperm whales accumulate toxins from the squid they eat, and the squid accumulate it from their own diet, but what are the…

Big squid news, in California at least: the state Department of Fish and Game announced that the fishery for California market squid is hitting its harvest limit and is scheduled to be closed on Friday. This is big news because A) market squid is the biggest fishery in California, worth tens of millions of dollars, and B) the harvest limit has not been hit basically ever. I say "basically" because the rules of the game--the fishery management plans--were revamped eight years ago, and the harvest limit hasn't been hit since then. Why was 2010 such a big year for market squid? Fingers point to…

All this talking I've been doing about those nasty ol' sperm whales hunting down and devouring poor defenseless squid (okay, they're not quite defenseless, but still) might make you think I'm a whale-hater. Not so! In fact, I harbor (heh heh) considerable sympathy for the cetaceans of the world, especially with regard to their tragic toxic burden. One of the basic features of toxins in the environment is bioaccumulation. Many toxic chemicals don't get broken down or washed out of an animal's body, they're simply stored forever. As the animal ingests more and more chemicals, they accumulate in…

Colors are not constant, they are relative and relatively speaking, bees see much differently than we do.Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Imperial College London have developed what they call FReD – the Floral Reflectance Database – that holds data on what colors flowers appear to be, to bees.    Records of flower colors don't take the visual systems of pollinator insects into account and bees have evolved completely different color detection mechanisms from humans so they see colors outside our own capabilities in the ultra-violet range. The research team have…

The mechanisms are used by plants when they extract water from very dry or inhospitable land could provide insight into how to do the same thing more efficiently for people. "In the case of mangrove swamps, for example, the plants are able to extract freshwater from a saltwater environment, despite the fact that the osmotic pressure should make quite the opposite happen," says Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, who studies this type of relatively unknown phenomenon as part of a new line of research that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at  Carlos III University of Madrid has begun.…

Okay, this is really cool. It's an interdisciplinary project between biologists, mathematicians, and engineers to understand and, eventually, mimic cephalopod skin. One of Hanlon's many discoveries is that cephalopod skins contain opsins, the same type of light-sensing proteins that function in eyes. "The presence of opsin means they have some primitive vision sensor embedded in their skin," Halas said. "So the questions we have are, 'What can we, as engineers, learn from the way these animals perceive light and color? Do their brains play a part, or is this totally downloaded into the skin…

Back in October I wrote on the subject of the Kraken, stating rather emphatically and cantankerously that whales eat squid. It is a unidirectional ecological interaction. I received a very thoughtful response from one Daniel Rolph, who commented I'm familar with 'whales eating squids,' and the discovery of 'beaks' of squids in their gullets, but I'm also curious about the statement made by the late biologist, Ivan T. Sanderson, who wrote among his many volumes, one entitled, 'FOLLOW THE WHALE,' which was all about the 'sperm whale.' He mentions the evidence of finding on sperm whales, huge '…